To syndicate or not to syndicate your content: that is the question. Here’s the scenario: you’ve got great original content, and you want to world to know about it. You want to share this content with the world in a way that will bring a hoard of visitors back to your site, to read more and more of it. So how do you do it?
The answer is simple, and I mean, really really simple, in fact, it is officially called “Really Simple Syndication”, which is abbreviated “RSS”.
By submitting your original article to RSS services, your article could easily go through channels that spit them out into thousands of websites all over the web, each with a link back to your site.
Related: How to “RSS” your articles.
So what’s the drawback? Duplicate content. You know as a webmaster, and a “SEO expert-to-be” that duplicate content hurts your ranking in the search engines. If Google sees too many articles that are found on your site which are also found on thousands of other sites, then your site loses “clout” in the “eyes” of the search engine.
What happens then? Your site or pages of your site containing duplicate content may be lowered or delisted from the search engine listing altogether. On the other hand, how can you “afford” to let go of all the amazingly free traffic that comes along with RSS services?
This begs the question: to syndicate your content or not to syndicate it.
I’ll give you a simple solution. Wait until your article has been posted to your site for at least six months before you submit it to RSS services. This way, Google will most likely be able to recognize your site as the original publisher of the article and rank you up instead of down.